Among the most simple and popular methods to begun developing a passive recurring earnings stream online is to begin a site or blog site. Siteground Affiliate Payout

But there’s a lot information out there and so various alternatives and directions … where do you even start?

Well, I understand it might seem a little bit overwhelming on the surface area, specifically if you’re brand name new to making money online, however much like a lot of things in life, so long as you have the RIGHT information, it’s in fact pretty easy.

Essential Tools You’ll Need

So, first of all, you’ll require a few vital tools to obtain started. The first is a domain (the real URL that people enter to access your site) and you’ll also require a hosting account (this is where all the files of your site are stored – websites, images, videos, etc.).

Domain Name

The first is thing you will need is your domain name. This is simply the URL that people will type in to get to your site. For example http://myveryfirstwebsite.com.

Now, if you buy your hosting account initially, they’ll generally include one domain totally free. When I first began that’s exactly what I did. And now I would extremely suggest keeping your domains different from your hosting accounts. This makes it a lot easier to transfer domains or redirect domains to various hosting moving on. Often you may want to change hosting companies due to an issue with support or that specific hosting service provider.

And just like there are several excellent hosting service providers, there are likewise several domain registrars you can go through to purchase your domain.

But the one I like the most is Namecheap. They’re really easy to use and they have good support.

To find your domain, you may already have one in mind, so you if that’s the case you can just search for it using their website to see if it’s available.

If it’s not, you can either go with an alternative domain extension like .net or .org or many times Namecheap will give you recommendations and suggestions based on what you typed in.

A tool that you may also find useful when coming up with a name for your website or blog is LeanDomainSearch.com.

I know there are a lot of domain extensions out there these days, but if possible I would still do my best to find either a .com, .net, or .org.

Web Hosting

Just like there are several options when it comes to where to register your domains at, there are a whole bunch of hosting providers.

Some are good. Some are bad. And some are just ok.

I personally like to go with companies that have been in business for years and years and have solid support and feedback.

There are several great solutions out there, and each reputable one has their strengths and weaknesses. But if you are planning on using your hosting for a few basic blogs or websites, and maybe you’re expecting a few thousand visitors each month to each of your sites, I would go with a hosting provider like SiteGround.

They’ve been around for a number of years. They’ve got strong assistance. And particularly if you’re just beginning, you’re going to remain in excellent hands with your site, without having be some techno nerd when it comes servers and things like that.

Things To Consider Before You Invest In Hosting

Do you need an SSL?

If you’re going to be selling anything directly on your site, not affiliate items, but anything e-commerce, where you’re offering a product directly on your website and accepting payment, you will most likely wish to consider purchasing an SSL certificate. This is how you get the “https://” on in the URL of your site instead of “http://“ and adds and extra layer of protection for visitors and customers of your website. Siteground Affiliate Payout

Most of the time a FREE SSL certificate is include in your hosting package. To double check it should tell you if you do or not on the hosting plan comparison on the site. If you don’t see it though or are not sure, just reach out to support and they will be able to point you to a package that does…and sometimes the SSL certificate may be an additional amount…it all varies on the hosting provider.

An alternative to purchasing an SSL certificate is to use a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare helps to protect your site viruses, bots and malware and also gives you a free SSL certificate.

You’ll need to point your domain to Cloudflare and then Cloudflare to your hosting account. It’s very simple and you should be able to find instructions on how to do that either on YouTube or by reaching out to your web host.

What Is A CDN And Do I Need One?

CDN stands for contend delivery network and is basically techno babble meaning your site is going to load a lot faster. The method a material delivery network works is that your site is cached on multiple servers around the world, so if somebody accesses your website from Italy, the CDN is going to pack your site for that user from it’s closest area to Italy, so that it loads in the fastest quantity of time for that user, so that they have the best possible experience with your site.

We’re generally talking about microseconds here, but this becomes more and more important the more visitors you attract to your site.

Some webhosting have actually CDNs built in to their network but then if your site starts to simply go viral and get lots of traffic you may want to consider either a host that specializes in and is known for the CDN or upgrade your hosting package/plan at your existing company.

Connecting Your Domain To Your Hosting Account

So, just to recap, I would find and register your domain name FIRST. Again, I recommend using Namecheap.

And then once you have your domain, you can sign up for your hosting account. For this I recommend going with SiteGround.

Alternative Hosting Solutions

SiteGround is just one of many hosting providers out there. These are a couple other alternative options you may want to consider:

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As you’re creating your SiteGround hosting account, there will be an option to select if you’d like to setup a brand new domain with SiteGround or if you have an existing domain that you would like to point to your hosting account. You’ll select the option that you already have a domain and just want to point it to the account you’re setting up.

Pointing Your Domain Nameservers To Your Hosting Account

So, once you’ve got your domain name and hosting, you need to point your domain to your hosting account, so that when people type in your URL (http://myveryfirstwebsite.com) it actually pulls up your website content instead of just the parked domain page from your domain registrar.

For instructions on how to do this, watch the video below…

TIP: When choosing a hosting account, I extremely recommend opting for a plan that permits you to have limitless domains (given that many people eventually have more than one). So, if you do this, it’s actually easy to add extra domains to your account. You’ll just go to your cPanel or back office dashboard and click the button that says something similar to “add domain” and you’ll key in the URL of the domain and include it to your account. Then you’ll have to point the nameservers of that brand-new domain from your domain registrar to your hosting account, just like you provided for the initial domain you included. And now you have more than one domain indicated your hosting account!

How Much Does Web Hosting Cost?

Among the reasons starting a blog site or website is one of the very best online organisations to begin is since of the really low start-up expense.

The prices of the majority of hosting bundles is typically just a few dollars per month, or you can spend for a year or 2 upfront and save a portion.

Every hosting company has different names for their strategies and bundles, but I would begin with whatever package enables you to host limitless domains.

Looking For Hosting Coupons And Deals?

Compared with other services you can begin online, a hosting account is currently among the most economical things you can invest in … however to make it even more economical, there’s usually great deals of deals and discount rates that you can find.

If you’re setting up a new account, you can usually find coupons, discounts, promos, or special Black Friday deals posted to popular deal sites like RetailMeNot.

Need Additional Help Or Have Questions While Selecting Your Hosting Package?

If you have other specific questions during the hosting signup process you have several options to get your questions answered.

The first place to check are the host’s FAQs (frequently asked questions) and knowledge base. Here you’ll find answers and solutions to many of your common questions.

However if for some factor you do not find what you’re trying to find there, you can connect to support straight by emailing, calling or sending out a message through live chat.

The host’s contact information must be prominently displayed on their website. But I’ve discovered that live chat generally gets the best and fastest response to any question.

Installing WordPress On Your Blog

Once you’ve got your hosting account setup, the next thing you’ll want to do is install WordPress.

This is actually really simple and if you login to your SiteGround back office or cPanel, you should see an option somewhere to install WordPress with 1-click. If you can’t find this option, reach out to support and they’ll be happy to assist you.

But doing this will install WordPress on your site/blog.

There are other blogging platforms such as Joomla and Drupal, but WordPress is by far the easiest to use and most popular blogging platform. It also has way more templates and plugins than the other two, so that’s why I recommend going with WordPress.

Setting Up Your WordPress Theme

Ok, so now you have WordPress installed, but you don’t want your site to be just some basic generic template. You want to be unique and somewhat customized.

There are a couple of great FREE ones, however, if your website is going to be an authority website or blog in your specific niche (essentially you’re going to put a great deal of time and effort into publishing excellent content on it and ensuring individuals can find it in the search engines) then I would HIGHLY recommend opting for a Premium WordPress theme.

When I developed my first WordPress site, I was incredibly inexpensive and used the best FREE styles I could find, but after awhile I recognized it’s a lot more worth it to spend $40-$100 one-time on a high quality Premium WordPress theme that’s going to provide me the capability to customize it simply how I desire, which I can utilize on all my other websites.

There are a lot of great Premium WordPress themes and websites out there, but here are a couple that I really like:

Google Analytics by Monster Insights – makes it super easy to connect your Google Analytics account to your site or blog, so that you can track your website traffic and get insights into the kinds of keywords that people are typing in to find your website

WP Zero Bounce – redirects the user if they come to your site and hit the back button (very useful for affiliate marketing)

Creating And Adding Google-Friendly Content To Your Website

Now that you’ve got your site all setup and your style and plugins all installed, you’re 95% there.

The main point delegated do is to just add material.

If you’re on a bootstrap spending plan or just truly like to write, you can create the content yourself.

However if you have a budget plan to work with and you’re not an author, you may think about contracting out niche related posts based around the subject or theme of your website.

If you’re considering having someone else write content for you, here are a few websites I recommend:

iWriter – This is a very affordable marketplace for outsourcing content. I would go for articles that are 1000 words or more and only work with writers that have a 4 star rating or above. You can get content written cheaper, but these are a few good metrics to start with.

BKA Content – Tf you have a more technical or specialized niche or topic, I would use these guys. They are more expensive, but in my experience they do a very good job and the quality is generally much higher than if you went to an article marketplace.

Format For Outsourcing Articles

My template for what I give writers when outsourcing articles is very simple.

I first decide what keyword, phrase or topic I want the writer to write on…

And then I give them this template:

Article Title

Introduction

Subhead

Paragraph

Subhead

Paragraph

Subhead

Paragraph

Conclusion Paragraph/Call To Action

It’s very simple and is essentially the same format as all the papers or essays you probably had to write in grade school.

That’s it. Don’t overthink it.

If You’re Writing Your Article Yourself

Now, without getting all technical and diving really deep into SEO (search engine optimization) and how Google ranks content in it’s search engine, what Google is looking for is really pretty simple.

Google’s main objective is to deliver the best possible search result to the user for the specific search phrase they typed in.

So, if you’ve got the most relevant article out there, with the most value and information about that specific topic…YOU WIN!!

So, how do you do that?

The way I would recommend going about this is to first do some research.

I like to use a keyword tool called KeywordTool.io, which gives you a list of long tail search phrases that people type in related to the keyword you search for.

For instance, if you were to type in “siteground” it knows that the most relevant results for the keyword “siteground” are all related to the hosting company. So, it’s going to give you a huge list of relevant keywords that people are typing into Google about that particular subject or phrase.

Exactly what I prefer to do is the copy that list of keywords into a notepad and start to cherry choice ones that I can compose a truly meaty short article about.

I’ll organize associated keywords into areas and those will be my paragraphs and subheads.

And after that as soon as you go through and rough out the instructions and flow of the short article you’re going to write, you now have a blueprint for precisely what to write … you merely just elaborate on each of the keywords and prior to you know it you’ll have a truly in-depth article that addresses the questions of numerous of the long tail search phrases that people commonly type in about that particular topic.

These are the sort of short articles that Google loves. It would much rather rank one great article for lots and great deals of keywords than numerous articles and pieces of content for particular search expressions.

So, by putting a little bit of extra work in on the front end and doing what most other people won’t take the time to do, you’ll really set yourself apart from your competition and you’ll see the organic traffic naturally start to pour in over time, without the need to purchase expensive backlinks to boost your pages in the SERPS.

Using Backlinks To Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

Now, I simply pointed out that if you structure your posts appropriately and concentrate on crafting a really thorough piece of content that targets much of the search expressions that most people enter about that subject, that alone will resolve a great deal of your SEO and ranking issues.

Nevertheless, if you do that and you’re website still isn’t ranking for they keyword you want it to … or perhaps that specific niche is relatively competitive, the only method to increase your article or site is to get external backlinks (other authority sites) point to it.

Traditionally this was done through guest publishing on other appropriate blog sites and websites, however this is incredibly challenging to make take place and extremely time-consuming.

So, the best option (which is actually also way easier) is to just buy authority links from other sites.

There’s several options out there for this but these are a few of my faves:

Blackhatlinks – A great place for affordable wiki, bookmark and social signals links.

Fiverr – Another great option for affordable social signals and bookmarks. Their site search kind of sucks, but if you use the categories and sort by top rated you’ll usually find the best gigs that way.

The HOTH – You can also buy social signals and all other types of links here, but this is a solid source for powerful high authority backlinks, which can really give your site a boost. These links are called HOTHBlitz.

Additional Hosting Information

Setting Up A Custom Email Address With Your New Domain

So, up until now you’ve probably just used free email providers for receiving email, but now that you’ve got your own custom domain name, you may want to have people email you at something like “[email protected]” and add that email to business cards. So, there’s actually several different ways that you can go about doing that.

Option 1

If you chose Namecheap for your domain registrar you can actually setup a custom email address within your Namecheap account and have it all hosted there. You can either redirect a custom email to an existing address (free). Basically when someone emails “[email protected]” you can have it forward to an email you check regularly like a Gmail account.

OR you can setup an actual webmail account associated with that custom email address within your Namecheap account. And that option is only a few bucks per year.

Option 2

You can setup a webmail account through your hosting account. So, within your cPanel or back workplace you ought to see a section for email. If you don’t, reach out to support and they will assist you discover where it is.

You can setup as lots of email addresses and webmails as you select, and you’ll be able to inspect them through your hosting account or if that’s a little cumbersome for you, you can also connect those webmail accounts to Apple Mail or Outlook or whatever program you utilize to check and organize and handle your mail. There are normally support articles and tutorials in the web hosting understanding base on the best ways to do this, however if you encounter any issues, simply reach out to your hosting support and they’ll have the ability to help you out.

Option 3

And last, you can create a Gmail account using your custom domain. This is called Gmail for Business and costs between $5-$10/month but it’s totally worth it if you don’t want to login using the clunky hosting webmail or you don’t use Apple Mail or Outlook. And with this option all your mail will be delivered to you in a familiar way, with the Gmail interface.

Using FTP Programs To Upload Your Website Files

First off…what the heck is FTP?

FTP stands for file transfer protocol and is just a fancy term for a program that communicates with your web host and allows you to upload, edit and delete files in your hosting account from your desktop, and without having to login to the cumbersome hosting back office.

FTP programs are really useful and save lots of time when adding several files to your site at once or large files.

You can use the basic file uploaders in your hosting back office to upload most files, but there is usually a file size limit for that tool. So, if you have a file that’s bigger than about 500MB, you’ll probably wind up having to use a FTP to transfer and add that file to your website.

FTP programs are really easy to use and there’s several great options out there. If you’re on a PC I recommend FileZilla and if you have a Mac I recommend Cyberduck.

You should be able to find instructions on how to use each of these on YouTube or the hosting knowledge base.

Earning Money By Promoting Hosting Companies

This whole article has been primarily about how to get setup your hosting account so that you can get started making money by driving organic traffic to website or blog, but did you know that you can actually make money by referring others to your same hosting provider?

And not only that, webhosting companies have some of the most financially rewarding affiliate programs. There are many popular blog writers that make 6 as well as seven figures each year in commissions, referring others to hosting strategies.

Hosting is one of the simplest things to sell and recommend too, given that it’s something that many everyone needs. If you’re planning to start your own site and wish to full control over every aspect of that site, then you’re going to need to buy your very own hosting.

So, that’s simply something additional to consider when you get going and have everything setup.

TIP: Another pointer as far as making money from hosting is becoming a reseller. There are actually just a handful of huge hosting companies in the world. The majority of other sites out there that you believe you’re purchasing hosting from are really just resellers of a bigger hosting business, indicating all the back end techy things is preserved by the moms and dad business and the site from where you acquired your plan or strategy from is simply spending for a reseller account from a service provider and simply marking it up and offering it to you. And you can do the specific same thing. Reseller accounts are really affordable, and even if you simply get a handful of companies, you can produce several thousand dollars every month with very little cost or overhead … so, that’s absolutely something to consider.

Just To Wrap Things Up

And that’s basically all there is to it.

I know it might seem like a lot if this is your very first time, but once you’ve purchased and setup a website one or two times, it specifies to where it just takes a couple of minutes.

The only time consuming part is the short article composing … but, once again, that can all be contracted out.

And after that if you’re publishing highly relevant material (that resolves your visitor’s concerns) regularly and you’re still not ranking where you want to, just purchase some backlinks and wait. Then you might have to purchase some more … and then wait some more. But eventually you’ll rank.

And if you’re looking for a great tool to keep track of all of your search engine rankings without you having to manually type each phrase in and check every day, there is a great tool called ProRankTracker which keeps track of all of your rankings in one simple dashboard.

Hopefully you got a lot out of this article and it answered most of your questions about setting up your own blog or website from scratch, but if you’re looking for some additional SEO tips and strategies, check out my SEO Siphon Strategy.